Posts Tagged ‘applicant tracking software’

When you start up your own company, it seems like there is a never-ending parade of tasks competing for your attention. One of the most important things you need to take care of is making sure you have a good system in place for hiring new employees, as that will dictate the pace and psychology of your company moving forward.

Finding the right people for the right job is crucial, but it’s also very important that each person will be a good fit in your startup, culturally speaking, according to a recent post at The Next Web. Here are four key aspects of the hiring process that startups will want to take into consideration as they bring in more people:

1. Evaluate Outside of the Office Environment

Any experienced human resources professional can tell you that the credentials and skills listed in a resume will only tell you part of the story about your job applicants. You need to take the time to really get to know prospective employees, to truly gauge their capabilities.

One useful technique is to move your applicants from the office to see how they will react. For example, request a lunch meeting or ask applicants to go out and grab a drink. Putting them at ease in a more social situation can encourage applicants to speak more freely than if you were conducting their initial interviews in a stuffy conference room or your office.

2. Utilize Technology to Pick Your Needles in a Haystack

Your HR team is likely being inundated with applications from people who are eager to join your startup. What is the best way to determine who are the most promising candidates to bring in to speak with your team?

For example, if you are hiring a programmer, you can help narrow down the applicants with an online coding test. Similar tests exist for other job categories. The important point here is that once you get some initial results, you can follow up with phone conversations or bring them in immediately for further discussions.

In today’s hiring environment, utilizing applicant tracking software should also be able to narrow this task down. Although humans are great at many things such as communication and picking up on subtleties, software can definitly help a hiring manager’s job by sifting through data and bringing top talent to the foreground.

3. Get Everyone Involved in Finding Applicants

Make it clear to everyone in your company that they are involved in the process of finding applicants. Employee referral programs are an excellent first step. Your team members likely know qualified individuals who could make a real difference. In addition, a proper referral program will provide incentives to those referring team members which will make them feel involved in the entire hiring process.

Remember to also harness the power of social media when you have a need for job applicants. Potential employees may run across your startup via Facebook friends or by reading tweets from your employees. Of course, Linkedin is always a great source of hiring potential.

4. Make Sure Prospects Fit in Well in Your Culture

It’s crucial that you preserve your company’s culture, especially when you are still in the startup phase.

Even if applicants are a good fit on paper and meet all your technical requirements to do the job, you still need to make sure that they will get along with the other members of the team. A good way to get an indication about whether they are a good cultural fit is by letting them spend some time with your team during interviews and the evaluation process.

By getting your employees involved in finding potential job prospects and taking the time to get to know each applicant, you will be well on your way toward ensuring the future success of your startup.

Applicant Tracking Software is a very polarizing topic. Most of us know from first hand experience that you either love your ATS or you want to throw it out the window and start over. Many of us are just stuck in a rut. We use what they give us or we inherit what was bought by someone who is now long gone.

Well, it’s 2011 and things are changing in the world of applicant tracking software. Progressive vendors make switching smoother than ever with software that’s easy to install, easier to use, and get this, it’s even affordable. Most vendors won’t even expect you to sign long, over-complicated contracts. They’ll provide fast, friendly, free support and they’ll import your legacy data. The bottom line is that you’re not stuck anymore.

Is it really time to make the switch? Maybe you’re just too hard on your current platform. See if it’s really time to ditch that zero and get with a hero.

We’ve created this simple quiz for you to see if it’s time to switch from your current ATS provider.
Simply jot down the number of times you said “no” to the questions in the quiz and compare your results with the key below.

When you contact support, does a person actually answer the phone and help resolve your problem?

Does your current ATS vendor provide free training and support?

Could you have started using your current ATS with virtually no training?

Does it feel like someone with real life corporate recruiting experience designed your ATS?

Do your hiring managers use your ATS regularly without being constantly begged?

Can you go to your current ATS and see exactly what’s happening with your jobs without having to click around or run a report?

Can you click on a ‘dashboard’ and get meaningful recruiting performance metrics at a glance?

Do you love the careers page that your ATS provides as part of the system?

Do you sometimes say to yourself “I’m so glad that we have this ATS”?

Do you feel like your ATS vendor listens to your complaints, comments, and suggestions and tries to improve their product?

Now count the number of times you said “No”: 0-3 – Congratulations! You’re in good shape. Gold star for you. 4-7 – It’s time to admit you have a problem. You should start lobying for a new platform. It’s time to get serious, see what’s out there.8-10 – Time to blow this popsicle stand! When’s your contract up? You need a change now.

Newton Software just revealed another feature aimed at assisting organizations in the creation or improvement of their job approval process.

They made this process flexible and it can be customized to assist an existing approval process or start an entirely new automated approval process. Once the requisition is created, the administrator has the option to select their choice of email driven approval processes. This provides the user with the ability to change and adjust the process as necessary.

Newton also delivers transparency with the recruiting dashboard, which lets users see where all jobs are in the approval process, in real-time. This gives users the power to identify the bottlenecks that are slowing down the requisition approval process and fix them before they create larger problems.

Newton Software continues to find ways to improve their applicant tracking software by adding an Automated Job Approval Process. This new feature falls in line with the rest of Newton’s easy to use, intuitive system. They took nearly a year to make this complex process both flexible and transparent. Taking that time allowed them to make something that worked great, rather than just another feature to add to the list.

Administrators can oversee the approval processes in real-time and address bottlenecks before they become jams. Newton also created this feature to allow users either to simply facilitate their current approval process or to completely start over and create a new automated process. Newton takes another one of the things users do 80% of the time and made it into a feature that works really well.

A little background to Job Approval:Job approval is a process which allows hiring managers and supervisors to request approval for a requisition. The requested job is then put through either a paper or email process before it is activated, and only then will the company begin to look for applicants.

Companies use job approval for a variety of reasons. It ensures that a consistent process is implemented every time a position is opened. It gives human resource teams the control to complete the appropriate audits before resourcing the recruiting process. Finally, the approval process provides recruiters the ability to see what requisitions are coming up in their recruiting process.

CIO.com recently published a very informative article titled “Social Networks: A New Hotbed for Hiring Discrimination Claims.” The article gives a comprehensive perspective into the world of corporate recruiting, particularly how recruiters are using social networks more and more to evaluate potential hires.
Social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter give recruiters and hiring managers the chance to look at a potential candidate’s everyday life, work habits and personal information. Increasingly, recruiters are this information to determine whether a candidate is a good fit for their company. However, using their findings as the basis for a hire can lead to a heap of discrimination claims against the company.
In this article, CIO.com spoke with HR consultant Jessica Miller-Merrell about some of the risks involved with using social networks to make hiring decisions. She outlines potential legal risks including niche demographic breakdown of specific social networks as well as the need for concise affirmative action reporting for government contractors. Furthermore, she says that making “hiring decisions based on protected information that a candidate provides on the internet… can get you in hot water”.
This is a topic that Newton Software, an easy-to-use applicant tracking software, has been following very closely. Newton’s own Joel Passen, interviewed Dr. Stephanie Thomas, one of the leading experts on the analysis of equal employment opportunity issues, almost a year ago for a podcast titled, “Can Social Recruiting Lead to Discrimination and Equal Opportunity Issues”.
There’s been a growing trend of workplace discrimination claims getting submitted over the past several years, and the addition of social networking as a hiring tool is bound to only increase the rate of claims. Every year, companies face many challenges in following confusing regulations that require them to provide detailed reports to various federal agencies.
These are the very factors Newton took into account when we decided to build EEOC/OFCCP compliance features into our recruiting software. We realized that companies already face a great risk in regards to complying with the U.S Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs for government contractors.) Bad or ignorant hiring practices and decisions can sink a business due to costly litigation battles over wrongful discrimination.
Newton’s EEOC /OFCCP Compliance tools make sure that all the right information gets collected, stored and tracked regardless of the source of the data. Voluntary self-identification surveys, reasons for non-selection, hire/offer logs, minimum qualification questions and flow logs (EEO1 reports) are just some of the tools that can help recruiters and human resources professionals keep track of all the mandatory information. Newton makes EEOC and OFCCP compliance a seamless part of the hiring process, so that when the time comes, a company does not need to scramble to deal with a problem.
While we haven’t yet seen a general precedent set regarding social networks and social recruiting, experts agree that it’s just a matter of time. As more companies start to use social networks as recruiting tools, there will be a social media recruiting precedent before you know it. For now, our advice is to seek guidance from counsel especially before using social media to vet applicants and to always have a consistent, compliant process in place when distributing job related information to social networks.

I’m gonna be real honest here. For the 10+ years that I was a corporate recruiter, I ran lousy staffing meetings.

If you’re anything like me, you’d rather be talking to people about jobs, fixing problems, or best yet, filling jobs rather than playing with spreadsheets. I loathed entering data on Friday afternoons just so I could get a report to my boss. The data was accurate, right? Sigh.

Staffing meetings were the bane of my existence (other than “turn downs” of course). I always felt a little defensive during staffing meetings. The quality of my work wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was my inability to show the quantity of my work that bothered me. Did the VP of Engineering know that I’d picked through 250 applicants before sending her those choice 5? No, this wasn’t on the staffing report. Did my boos know that I collected 185 profiles of product managers that had knowledge of some obscure security protocol, called them all and got one to send me their resume. No, the report just showed that we only had one candidate interviewing. Double sigh.

I have a friend that says, “recruiters either make hires or make excuses”. I believe this. When I wasn’t making hires, I was forced to make excuses because I didn’t have the data to back me up to do otherwise. I didn’t want to be seen as a whiner, complaining about hiring managers not reviewing candidates or not giving me feedback or how many hours I’d spent to find that one person. I’d just say that I’d work harder. This was a vicious circle, one that I’d seen burn out the best recruiters.

So, a couple of years ago when I was given the opportunity to provide some input into a new tool that would help recruiters show all of their work and actually run a valuable staffing meeting, I jumped at it. Early on, I even used the tool to run a couple of recruiting programs at a recruiting outsourcer. And eventually, I went to work for that very same company that that great tool for recruiters.